Planetarium In Brass: Yumemi Plays Doorkickers

[Hoshino Yumemi]

"In ten years, nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived."
-Widely-quoted rules of gunfighting, Rule #7​

I'm not the best at tactics games.

I'm sure this comes out with my fizzling out of the Frozen Synapse LP, which was partly due to flagging hardware and mostly due to me trying to race Frozen Synapse 2 to release. There's a lot of stuff you haven't seen me do: I've embarrassed myself by trying to turtle with the very mobile French forces in various Wargames. I've made the endgame of Luminous Arc 2 ludicrously hard for myself because I tried playing it normally instead of using hilarious cheese the game practically fucking giftwraps for you (and with this new, powerful rig you may very well get to see that idiocy all over again). And, of course, there's the enfilade-defilade clusterfucks from the FS LP.

However, the flipside is that I find the fighting, the planning, and the execution incredibly fun, which is why I'm taking you all along with me for this next excursion.

As for a little metaplot? Well, considering my end goal for Frozen Synapse 1 was Yumemi shapeform fuckery to avert some nebulous Bad Thing™, let's walk down this same path. Let's say this Yumemi can shunt from world to world with the Retry counter. How'd it get put in Furi? Ah, yes…

What do I do with an eternity to do nothing but wait?

I train.

I wasn't good enough to be Tactics before, and that's not happening again. Not if I can help it.




First things first, though, I have to start from the beginning.

…really, I do have to start from the very beginning, in Single Mission mode. I level up by completing missions and the game lets me take campaigns from Level 6 onwards, so I have some hustling to do.

Kill houses are a very real component of training the kinds of SWAT forces that Doorkickers will have you controlling. Essentially indoor shooting ranges simulating close quarters combat and room-to-room fighting, they're designed to turn the extremely lethal, unpredictable environment for gunfighting that a simple living room can provide into a predictable combat zone that a trained operator can dominate. Concepts like the fatal funnel of breaching a door and slicing the pie when rounding corners originate here.

As you can see in the above picture, this one features five targets inside a small house made up of two hallways linking two rooms in a sort of winding path. Here, let me switch to the actual in-game map to show you the map better:



That's better.

Loading up my first tactical simulation, we can see more of how this game works. Coming from Frozen Synapse, I can say that it basically feels like a less aggressively front-loaded Frozen Synapse. Gone is the system of waypoints and telling your vatforms exactly what to do at the exact moment you want it to happen courtesy of a bigass dropdown menu, in are context-sensitive commands and some hard and fast rules. Here's the first ones to learn, I suppose:

• You can either play this game in real-time mode, or FS-style, as real time with pause. Everyone moves and stops simultaneously, with spacebar toggling starts and stops to the action.
• Left click to draw paths for your guys to follow. Normally they will face in the direction they're walking, seeing and engaging targets in their line of sight (the cone of color as opposed to all the black and blue), but if you want them to point in a different direction, you hold down right click and then drag in the direction you want them to look. In real time this will have them change their direction to look wherever the mouse is pointing, but you can also order strafing motions by holding down Ctrl and right click.
• Anywhere on the paths you draw, you can right click to lay down actions.

With that in mind, here's a simple entry plan. Jeff over here is going to head straight in, down the hall, and round the corner.



Covering him is…uhhh…this guy who clearly named himself before things kicked off. He will strafe as he hits the corner and round it with his weapon already trained into the room. This is a very rudimentary attempt at slicing the pie, a way to round corners with your gun trained so you're already pointing at any possible threats coming around the corner.

Without any more elaborate plans, nor any real reason to suddenly employ them for a freaking kill house, I hit Space and see what transpires.



As it turns out, the first of our five targets was right in the hallway. As soon as the two operators rounded the corner, they ran right into him, guns blazing, and he was cut down. Tango number two followed shortly thereafter, out in the open where the idea of slicing the pie actually really helped get the drop on him.

Also, it seems these are targets that shoot back, and three of them in the following area sounds like a recipe for trouble. It looks like I get to show off more commands really early.



Right-clicking on things brings up menus like these. For an operator, it brings up stuff they can do. From the left going clockwise, that's reloading, switching to a different weapon which these guys can't do since they don't have any other weapons, throwing flashbang grenades, using breaching charges which is impossible without any actual doors in this building, and the exciting "delete waypoint," which is something you can already do by right-clicking a waypoint anyway and hitting Delete Waypoint from there. Maybe it's to kill an entire path.

So, I tell my men to reload and then slowly move them up.



Mr. I Use My CS:GO Handle is to proceed down the hall and stack up right at the edge of the doorframe. Jeff is to stick around at the other side of the hall, since I'm either facing two on three or two on two odds, depending on if there's a tango in there, too.



Jeff has been getting pretty shot-up, getting an Injured status from tango number three, and this is the perfect time to flashbang the next room. Which I do, which I think prepares me for the next room, but, well…



See, I sweep in and as you can see in the next few screenshots, one guy still manages to get a bunch of hits in on me. Maybe I should've swept both guys in and concentrated fire?






Still though, I complete my business. The in-game clock says I took abnormally long because...I forgot to pause the game in the course of preparing my flashbang and only found out when I saw Jeff throw the stupid thing after I placed the marker down.




So, let's click on that progression bar, maybe that thing saying "Roster" and-



…oh, wait a freaking minute, I can edit my guys. I see myself having fun with this.

More specifically, I see YOU all having fun with this.

Who wants to valiantly step up and help me go from tactically tragic to magic? Give me a name, any nicknames, and as I start leveling up, classes and general weapon and equipment types you want to use. I dunno what each class puts up specifically, so be as general as you can about arms and armor, and I'll accommodate you. Hey, it's totally safe! They're, ahem, uploaded tactical simulations, after all.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

I'll be going out of order for this next one, partially because some of the introductory single missions aren't much to talk about so you're not missing a lot if I do them and don't tell you, and mostly because Mission 4 is an excellent introduction to the actual bloody business of kicking doors. The breach is a big part of Doorkickers, so as your second taste of the game this is probably for the best.



Doesn't get simpler than that: two operators, a room, and a closed door. Four targets, somewhere inside this single room, and all I'm armed with thanks to my seriously green play thus far is two flashbangs apiece, and two men with two Glock 17s.

The little polymer popgun that could is the starting weapon of the game as there are yet no classes that can wield anything else other than handguns. As a starting handgun, a wonder nine (common nickname for these 9mm automatics that have something to the tune of 15 or so rounds plus one in the chamber and are also nice all around in terms of handling, accuracy and reliability) is good, since these guns are accurate for handguns and have good capacity, too, so you don't have to necessarily sit around micromanaging people on reloading when you pause the action.

Your purchasing power in this game is represented by the stars you earn for completing missions. Right now I have six, and I'll be saving up for more interesting toys down the line since all that would buy are slightly different handguns at the moment. Everyone is also wearing what's called "Low Threat Armor," which is a basic bitch bulletproof vest. Good if you're a cop who kind of expects someone might take a potshot at him, maybe a little on the piddly side if you're bursting into a room with four angry men with guns on the other side.

However, Doorkickers is a deep tactical game, and befitting this kind of thing, you get to choose how to breach this.

A word on breaching, now: breaching a room is one of the most dangerous acts you can perform in any kind of indoor firefight because it flies in the face of everything you've ever been told about how to fight people. Castles were designed the way they were so attackers had no choice but to go in the direction of their choosing, where all kinds of horrible things could happen to them. If you're breaching a room and the guy on the other side knows you're on the way, and has adequately prepared, you're potentially entering a situation where the minute you pass through the doorway, you will be outnumbered, outgunned, and flanked for good measure.



Just to demonstrate this point, let's do a first run where we do the frankly idiotic thing of making like the game's title and kicking some doors by just barging through the front:



See that? Three guys got killed but my guys were being shot by four different attackers. One cop died immediately while the other stuck around just long enough for Bad Guy #4 to finish him off. On top of that, those two guys who died by the sofa were in cover, which according to the game rules causes 50% of all shots taken at them to miss. They had a tactically superior position, and you never want to just blunder right the heck into that.

So, let's restart and do this like a smart person might, and go through the basic tools for door breaches you're gifted when you start out.



Let's start by right-clicking the door and selecting the Spy Camera, as I already have here. The Spy Camera is…well, if you've ever seen a playthrough of SWAT 4 like, say, Spoony's back in the day, you'll know what this does. It's a little camera on a flexible line that you can use to see into rooms behind closed doors by sticking it under the crack at the bottom.

While that's going on, I move the other officer to the other side of the door to prepare for the breach.



That's better!

By sweeping the camera back and forth, we now know where the bad guys are: two taking cover behind the sofa, one at the table, one at the far left-hand corner where he'd be missed the first go-around unless someone, say, did what I did just now. Targets who are in the camera's line of sight are shown as if you're looking at them, targets who are spotted but out of the camera's line of sight are red silhouettes.

Oh, by the by, it's worth noting that SWAT teams for all their seriously militarized kit normally train to bring everybody in alive, from hostages to perps to themselves. If the plan is to wade in and waste guys as the first go-around, things have escalated and this is the last step before things go Seriously Wrong™.

Right, now how to go about ensuring that we're preventing another spat of officer deaths?

Well, now that we know where everything is, we have some options, which I'll be demonstrating now. The first one is my natural inclination: chuck a flashbang through the door, then swoop in while the largest bulk of hostile firepower is dazed.

First order of business is to have one officer kick the door open without barging through, then to chuck in a flashbang and barge in. This is where I'd use those four buttons you see at the bottom of the screen labeled A through D. These are Go Codes. They're a very simple command that amounts to "wait until I give THIS signal to move." There's one automatic condition in waiting for an all clear to move, and four manual Go Codes from A to D. The plan is to go right after the flashbang explodes: the officer on the right is to take cover behind the couch while the officer on the left is to immediately go for the guy hiding out in the corner.

…actually, what happened at that point was that I found out that the Go Code also meant nobody banged the room, so none of what I said just happened. Instead a firefight right outside the door happened and the four perps were gunned down just in time for the right-hand-side officer to throw a flashbang…at his own partner. See, that's why the broken-ass robot is getting TACTICAL SIMULATIONS, I PROMISE as a bunch of first goes.

Let me try that again.



So, uh, as it turns out, one of the commands is to throw a flashbang through the door, so let's see how that works. Same plan though, bang and clear.

The results look something like this…






Those little medals there in the last screen are bonuses for drawing out a single plan and completing the mission that way, and executing it in one chunk of real time without pausing at any point in between.

That was fun, wasn't it? There is one more way to do it, though, which is to plant breaching charges on the door and to clear the room after detonating them. Let's see what that looks like.

You plant breaching charges when you want to suddenly and forcefully breach a door, with the idea being that they'll not only suddenly blow the doors off but seriously mess up anyone near it. The key word there is "anyone near it," compared to throwing a flashbang into the center of the room I doubt an explosion way away from anyone inside will do all that much.



Regardless, upon planting our little door hanger the situation looks like this.



The plan is to beeline for the couch to use it as cover for the guy in the corner. Upon detonation I'll hit Go Code Alpha and these guys will move in as one.

(Or not, as I'd learned that the Go Code meant the free cop waltzed in and got himself gunned down the first time I tried this. The real trigger to suddenly move is blowing up the door by clicking the big red detonator button.)

The resultant execution of what I WANTED that plan to look like looks something like this…





It's…not as impressive as the bang and clear and how well that worked, but I see the advantage. The nearest guy was still stunned, and the main advantage of this form of breach is its suddenness. More of a delay with the bang and clear, but the results were a lot cleaner to my mind. Though if those rooms were smaller, I sure as heck could see that working a lot better.

In all the chaos, I'm at eight stars to unlock stuff with, and I'm now Level Two, so I get to show something off.



This is how I give extra abilities and specialization to my entire squad by the way of Doctrine, providing extra techniques for my guys by the type of gun they use. Since I'm stuck with handguns for the next couple of levels, I'll pick that one with the crosshairs to spend my first Doctrine Point on. That's Surgical Shooting, which provides accuracy bonuses all across the board, especially at long range. That will let me shoot it out more reliably at longer ranges, so I can start and end engagements faster. That right there is one of the rules of gunfighting, after all. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get, and being more capable of starting a firefight on my terms means being, overall, more capable of ending one on my terms, too.

Changing Doctrine is also very painless: at any point you can hit Reset and get all your Doctrine points back to redistribute on what you feel works better for how your play style evolves.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

Since I still have to level and stuff in order for you guys to enjoy some novelty when I play and I've got one more to go right now before I get access to campaigns, I've taken the liberty of doing the leveling necessary to unlock some stuff!



First things first. With every level I get, I get a Doctrine Point, so I've been spending them.

For handguns, Point Shooting, that colored icon in the upper left-hand corner of the Handguns tree, joins Surgical Shooting to get increased aim speed to go with my increased accuracy. This lets my troopers win damage exchanges with more regularity when it's sidearms on sidearms, since they start shooting sooner in addition to hitting more often.

You can see there's a brand-new addition to the tree, too: Long Guns. Don't worry, I'll introduce you formally in a minute, but I went with their Doctrine equivalents for the long guns the way I did with handguns, so everyone is more reliably shooty.

So what do the long guns mean?



In this game, it means I got a new class: Assaulter.

These guys use submachine guns and rifles, which the game sees fit to term long guns, although quite a few compact PDWs and the very pistol-like MP7 also fill this role. They're your long-range and mid-range damage-dealers and their capabilities can be tuned to your liking on if you give them a full-blown battle rifle like the HK 417, which is in this game, or an FN P90, which is also in this game. Either way, they will become your bread and butter as you play the game.

What disadvantages do they have over the starting class, Pointman? Just one: they aren't as mobile. Pointmen only get their sidearms, but they have more natural hustle so they can do the legwork on larger maps of setting explosives, banging and clearing, and generally keeping things straight for the rest of the squad.

I also bought a couple new toys: Assaulter Armor is kinda more protective than the Low Threat Armor you start with, and the SP01 Shadow is a new pistol which makes it a very economical purchase as it's used by all classes, and its stats make it a direct upgrade to the Glock 17. They start with the venerable old MP5 submachine gun, which is an average weapon in all respects and good for learning the class.

But you don't want to see me talk about them, do you?



No, you want me to demonstrate. And demonstrate I shall.

Let's answer this call to bust this apartment wide open. The red silhouettes at the briefing are targets we totally know are in the building. The ones with question marks are probables: maybe they're inside, maybe they aren't. Either way, this mission ends with all these guys taken down.



When you start most missions in Doorkickers, you get the opportunity to pick deploy positions up to the maximum amount of troopers you're allowed for the mission. …which is two, for two possible deploy positions. The, uh, only deploy positions.

Yeah.

…let's just get on with it.

A word of advice if you play Doorkickers: troopers level up too, gaining bonuses to accuracy, Assault Shooting, which I assume is aim speed upon contact with targets, and Field Skills, which I assume is speed in setting up stuff like breaching charges, spy cams, and other gizmos I haven't unlocked yet but will happily show off.



I start out with the Spy Camera. Two of three guaranteed tangos out of cover and in direct line of sight is encouraging, so I feel I can be aggressive in my handling of this.



That means setting up explosives to bash the door down directly and gun down these guys before they can put their pants on. The plan also includes the two officers, a couple of rookies, covering one another.



This…only half works because the tangos just start shooting the shit out of the Assaulters and their firepower advantage is negated as a result. I lose a cop and gun down three opponents…and the mission doesn't end. There's more folks in here.



Gonna be cautious and press down this way, right-click aiming as I go.



Nothing. I'm immediately suspicious.

Since I'm closer to the closet, I order the rookie to go and check what's in there.



Nothing. Must be the computer room, then. If I cover myself with a flashbang instead, how'll that shake out?




The answer is badly. That was a failing of my tactics, not my men. In hindsight I should have just flung a flashbang at them and then ducked into one of the adjacent rooms rather than standing out in the open.

So what would this have looked like with Pointmen?







…bang and clear for my combat style it is, then.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

It's time for me to learn a new skill. It's time for a new game mode, Hostage Rescue.

This is what we see in all the TV shows and movies. A standoff with a perp has been dragging on and the whole flipping precinct is trying to buy time for the good guys to get there to take the criminal down and save the hostages. As this is a training mission, there's just a few tangos and one hostage in a very simple area.



The actual mechanics of this are that we need to take the hostage to that green patch marked RESCUE ZONE. We don't have to kill every enemy, but it might be helpful if we did to avoid getting hostages shot in the back while we run pell-mell for the extraction zone.

However, in the game's fluff it mentions that, well…hints, really, that friendly fire is a thing, and an errant shot or missed grenade toss as much as anything else will kill the hostage. And yes, this includes breaching charges and still more kit I have not yet unlocked. We're gonna be here a while, folks, stay seated because this projection has just started.



Same opener as usual, then: spy camera, then breach and clear the room.



Two of the four tangos in sight, one right by the corner and one at the far end of the room. I immediately engage.

My boys take a couple hits, but they're okay. Next order of business is to get a lay of the closed door and see where that gets us.



We got our hostage and the remaining two bad guys. They're carrying long guns. They get a flashbang.




…or I could forget, YET AGAIN, that other commands override the whole "wait for the flashbang" thing. Doesn't matter, we still saved the hostage. Since the bad guys are all neutralized, the mission is considered cleared by default.

From here, things are only gonna get harder as I continue training, and there's still some mission types left to go.

...why do I have the feeling that this is...kind of building to something?